Balanced or single ended phono stage?

Listen to Atmosphere on the advantages of balanced designs. I have no connection to him but I have been using balanced systems for a long time and I am a believer.

Not to say single ended equipment can't sound better in a scheme of things. System dependent.

Having owned the Ayre P-5x it is a very good reasonably priced phono pre.

Its a true balanced input to output unit. That is vs some units that add balanced circuitry at the end, an extra stage at the end of single ended design. Not the way to do it.

The Ayre P-5xe is nice in that you can use the RCA single ended input and still take advantage of the balanced input. Just flip the bal/single ended switch to balanced. There is a slight difference in signal path but I verified with Ayre that both sides of the signal get to the diff input though there is a slight difference in signal path length which should not matter for practical purpose.

I used it as I described and also with the proper xlr input with the same tone arm, a Tri planar VII, which I had converted from RCA to XLR. Did not notice a difference!

Great unit. For me it took a major step up in price to better it.

Dave, no worries. It was several years ago. Let me back up a bit.

I had a VPI Aries II TT when I picked up the Ayre P-5x. I did indeed order a custom made phono cable that was configured per the Ayre link you provided. The RCA end plugged into the RCA termination block on the Aries and the other end had XLR connectors for the Ayre phono. Worked well. I still have the 1/2 meter cables.

I don't think VPI had a XLR term block at that time.

I then picked up a used Triplanar VII which had single ended RCA connectors on the built in phono cable. After a while I realized that I had never flipped the bal/se switches to the single ended position! When I did it sounded a tad worse so I left them in the balanced position.

No doubt the change in gain made it hard to compare.

I later converted the Triplanar phono cable to have XLR connectors thinking it might be better. Again I did not notice anything after that process.

Curious, I pinged Ayre's Charles Hansen on Audio Asylum and asked him what was going on. It was a while ago but iirc he said with the switches in the "bal" position the negative or inverted part of the RCA input used of course for unbalanced inputs was allowed to float thus the inverted signal from the cartridge made it to the inverted input of the diff amp.

Not the best way, but as long as the inverted signal in the cable is allowed to float, never grounded, it works because of his design.

I did a quick search on the Asylum to try and find the thread but could not locate it. The search has some quirks to it and I will spend some more time tomorrow watching football.

Might be quicker to repost on the Asylum.

Hope that helps.